While comparative educators only began to explicitly discuss their theoretical
framing dispositions following the appearance of Thomas Kuhns magnum opus,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, implicit knowledge perspectives
can be identified in works of the fields founding fathers. The 18th and
19th Century foundational texts of Berchtold, Jullien and Basset, for example,
all advocate encyclopedic description and macro historical comparisons of public
instruction in order to generalize on its efficiency in the then-emergent project
of individual and social modernity. With the ensuing construction of national
systems of education in the industrial, or modern world, and their transfer
to the colonized world, comparative educators shifted their attention to the
study of social forces and contexts in the shaping and differentiation of these
systems. By 1950, the work of Sadler, Kandel and Hansamong othershelped
to consolidate the functionalist paradigm as the dominant, even if implicit
and unspoken, way of representing or modeling national and cross-national educational
phenomena.

Figure 1 below seeks to capture textual knowledge orientations in exemplar comparative
education scholarship during three major periods: i.e., in the 1950s and 1960s
when functionalist and positivist orthodoxy dominated; in the contentious 1970s
and 1980s when the radical functionalist, humanist, and radical humanist paradigms
challenged orthodoxy and unresolved heterodox struggles prevailed; and in the
emergence of a more heterogeneous period (with the somewhat reluctant acceptance
of the complementarity of different paradigms) as we move into the 1990s. To
facilitate comparison, Figure 1 distinguishes between eight kindsor directionsof
hermeneutic reference within the texts noted, i.e., knowledge control and organization;
knowledge and ontology, framing, and style; knowledge and gender/emotions; and
knowledge products.6
Textual representations in comparative education, it might be noted, have for
over a century rather closely tracked the rise and fall of the functionalist
paradigm in sociology, in social anthropology, in political science, and in
modernization and human capital theories, as may be seen in the following chronology
summarized in Figure 1.

Following World War II with the crises of decolonization and cold war competition,
comparative education studiesand especially those in North Americacontinued
to be framed in evolutionary and functionalist perspectives while moving closer
to the social sciences and their concerns to explain and inform social and economic
development using the vocabulary, if not the rigor, of the natural sciences.
The florescence of comparative and international education studies during these
decades of functionalist and positivist orthodoxy also drew strength from the
creation of scholarly journals in the field, an increase in governmental and
foundation support, and the founding of numerous comparative education centers
in leading U.S. and European universities.

At the Comparative Education Center at the University of Chicago, for example,
Arnold Anderson, the first director, argued in a foundational text that the
ultimate aim of comparative education isas with the social sciencessystematic
knowledge of causation, i.e., the shaping of the results of analysis into law-like
generalizations. Where earlier educational research and educational psychology
programs had gained entrance and eventual methodological respectability in European
and North American higher education using statistical and experimental methods,
Anderson proposed that comparative education should seek acceptance with a strategy
of: 1) integration with the social sciences; 2) the use of the natural sciences
model of hypothesis testing and analysis of co-variation; 3) a commitment to
theoretical explanation and generalization; and 4) a conservative, if implicit,
political bias.7
Over a decade later, Anderson continued to predict progress in the identification
of functional equivalents for the basic structures and functions of educational
systems. He admonished, however, that the price of progress
would require the exclusion of competing paradigms: Perhaps, we should
cease to speak of society as a seamless web and see it rather as
a matrix of .5 correlation coefficients. Accordingly, holistic conceptions of
society should be espoused with heavy qualifications, even when we would do
not put conflict at the center of our conceptual scheme.8

Heterodoxy

By the early 1970s, functionalist theory and positivist methods had achieved
the status of orthodoxy in comparative and education studies at the same time
they came under attack in the social sciences and in development studies from
a combination of emergent critical and interpretive knowledge communities. Reasons
for the vulnerability and eventual decentering of functionalism in the 1970s
and 1980s are suggested in the shift from a segregated to a plural society in
the U.S. With cultural pluralism came epistemological and ontological pluralism.
Functionalist theory, moreover, proved unable to adequately predict or control
frequent development failures.9
Equally important, the rise of a global field with numerous new scholars and
comparative education programs in Europe, Asia, and the Third World saw the
emergence of antithetical neo-marxist, critical theory, feminist, and dependency
perspectives, i.e., new ideas, to challenge the old ideas and legitimacy of
functionalist orthodoxy.10

Emergent Heterogeneity

Representations of knowledge in comparative education texts began a shift away
from ideological confrontation and heterodoxy in the late 1980s.11
While a few researchers still claim orthodox purity and remain within their
exclusive paradigmatic utopiasand many continue unsuccessful partisan
efforts to replace one world-view with anotherthe decline of grand theory
in the social sciences means that today no one knowledge community can claim
a monopoly of truth or claim to fill all intellectual space.12
Rather, a growing number of researchers and practitioners see all claims to
universal, foundational knowledgebe they grounded in positivist science,
or interpretivist science, or Marxist scienceas
incomplete and problematic.13

Husén, for example, has pointed the way past heterodoxy with his recognition
that no one paradigm can answer all questions, that all serve to complement
supposedly conflicting and incommensurable world-views.14
Paulston sees the field moving from paradigm wars to a new and confused terrain
of disputatious yet complementary communities as the use of knowledge becomes
more eclectic and reoriented by new ideas and new knowledge methods in, for
example, interpretations, simulations, translations, probes, and conceptual
mapping.15
Knowledge has also become more textual. It is increasingly seen
as construction employing a conventional sign system where even non-book texts,
such as icons, architectural structures, musical compositions, or graphic texts
such as maps, are seen to presuppose a signifying consciousness that it
is our business to uncover.16
With the appearance of feminist, post-structural, and post modern studies, among
others, comparative education discourse has also begun this excavation17
with a shift in knowledge framing perspectives from foundational to antifoundational
orientations.18